Nabokov’s Cold War Novels and the Containment of American Sexuality

Abstract

This paper focuses on Nabokov's American fiction as novels of the so-called “Long 1950s” and tries to divert traditional debate of Nabokov’s work from its canon of post-modern reception, as centering on language play and upended narrative codes. By focusing on the ever present subtext of Cold War culture in Nabokov’s narratives, this research tries to identify the complex elaboration of “subversive sexuality” in Nabokov’s key novels of the Long 1950s, Lolita and Pale Fire, his most successful and most widely commented works.